So news of MyBlogLog possibly departing saddens me, and will affect the web materially.

In many ways the only reason I still have a Yahoo account is MyBlogLog as I still log into their stats daily. The other reason is for Site Explorer and other webmaster tools – I don’t do paid search advertising with Yahoo.

The silly thing is MyBlogLog whilst it has never lived up to it’s promise isn’t in decline among people who actually use the site so much as it has been in decline in the mediasphere.
There might be a reduced number of widgets installed, but that is something hard to measure externally.

Using a comparrison that ignores widget installations such as Alexa clearly shows that in many ways MyBlogLog has been growing – even their search traffic has been pretty stable.

It is important to ignore widgets, as for instance with Compete it throws the numbers off totally giving Technorati some semblance of growth due to advertising widgets. (look at Quantcast for real measured numbers)

At the same time I would ignore Quantcast numbers for MyBlogLog, as they are not Quantified.

The Read Write Web article on the demise of MyBlogLog discusses the possibilities of the MyBlogLog API which has always been very feature rich – Blogcatalog has had one as well, though it probably needs a way to pass data back to a hosting page based on a visitor, and social graph data exposed.

The news doesn’t surprise me, the last post on the MBL Blog was a year ago. The next post is most likely to say they are shuting down.

APIs are important but ultimately you can get most of the demographic and social graph data you need without it as Tim can happily demonstrate.
I am not sure whether Tim ever used the API in anger for his commercial clients, but it had huge possibilities.

From a search context the loss of MyBlogLog will be missed – it was a good source of links from members of your community, and the pages in some ways were more favored than Technorati’s (more pages in primary index) but ultimately MyBlogLog has been infested with spam for years.

For me the biggest mistake by MyBlogLog was their implementation of user generated tagging.

Here is the user generated tag page for this blog – MyBlogLog tag pages have been infested with web vermin for 2 years.

The tag pages were introduced whilst the original founders were with the company.

Update From Yahoo

Yahoo on the YDN Blog have posted an update on the future of MyBlogLog. Nothing decided yet.

Hey YDN team – if you do finally axe MBL, can we get access to Yahoo Web Analytics instead?

I also find it a little strange that the post was on the YDN blog, maybe they forgot the MyBlogLog blog login?

Friendfeed Now Counted In Feedburner

It can make quite a striking difference with Feedburner if you have a few followers there.

But even this doesn’t really account for the shifting sands in online attention.

The latter half of this post was originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

Since then Twitter has for many people emerged as the primary way they read RSS feeds, combined with various forms of lifestreaming.

The first time I see tweets and blog posts often is also on services such as Blogcatalog’s dashboard or even Mybloglog (though that can sometimes lag a little on updates these days)

Current Calculation Problems

• Blogcatalog & Mybloglog numbers are just as relevant as Friendfeed
• Twitter numbers are probably more relevant than any Lifestreaming service
• Facebook subscribers are still not counted
• Aweber & Feedblitz, along with Feedburners own RSS to Email service are included, but they are the only ones I know about. Where is the Getresponse support Simon? Infusionsoft should really offer something as well, though they don’t offer RSS to email – I am not sure about Mailchimp

The onus really is on the developers of these other platforms to report numbers to Feedburner, but I have no idea how that can be managed with Facebook and Twitter.

With both Facebook and Twitter there are 2 significant problems

• The data doesn’t always come from an RSS feed – individual Facebook apps programmers use various methods to pull data, and often Facebook items come from other sources. The source on Twitter could be any one of the many RSS to Twitter services, but equally could be a WordPress plugin.
• Items get shared – shared items in Google reader have often affected Feedburner data in the past, how does this work with retweets?

It is good to see services like Postrank now feature within Feedburner stats, as they provide various ways to filter RSS content on multiple topics, and then include only the best items for you to read.
(Niche marketers will probably find a way to make best use of that)

Note: I do have specific strategic reasons why I don’t currently display any RSS subscription options, or even an email subscription box.
This post used to have lots of comments, but Disqus hasn’t managed to sync them after 2 days.

It is amazing how long it takes for things to catch up, the following was written over 15 months ago, and the numbers are really still totally inaccurate

Originally published Mar 21, 2008 @ 20:38

I have been digging around in my Feedburner stats to see how various social streaming and life streaming applications I use are reporting data to Feedburner.

Friendfeed

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feedreader & Aggregator
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; FriendFeedBot/0.1; +http://friendfeed.com/about/bot)

5 subscribers

Blogcatalog

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Bot
Blogcatalog bot

1 hit

MyBlogLog

I am not sure which Yahoo service they are reporting as, so I am listing a few possibilities

Currently reports as:-

Section:- Feed Readers and Aggregators
My Yahoo
A web-based newsreader that allows you to select and manage RSS headlines within a My Yahoo! account.
42 subscribers

There is also Yahoo! Slurp and Yahoo Test Bot – both listed as bots

Is Lifestreaming Subscribing?

Here are some reasons Lifestreaming should count as a subscription

• Personal – with most applications views can be attributed to individual users
• Selected – unlike meme trackers, someone has made a specific choice to read your content
• Trackable – if necessary it would be possible to identify only active users
• Traffic – traffic from lifestreaming is quite visible, though it is hard to determine if it comes from a RSS subscription link, or when someone tweets about you, or maybe from being Stumbled or dugg
• Email – Friendfeed sends subscriptions by email too – does that make it 2 subscriptions?
• Active – people are actually using these services more and more, and subscription data would thus be a useful representation

There are some aspects I am not sure should be counted, but are probably more valuable data than from many feedreaders

• Profile views – MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Friendfeed all allow visitors to view content before deciding to subscribe to it in some way – whist no long term commitment is made, a lot of this activity can be attributed to individual unique users, thus could be counted as a subscriber in some way.
• Shared Social Media Links – as mentioned before, when links to your site appear having been dugg, stumbled or shared in Google Reader – whilst this can result in traffic, it might not be something that can be counted as it is not necessarily related to the RSS feed, but to the permalink.
• MyBlogLog Topics – this is based upon their tagging system (I have wanted it to link to content for ages – make sure you update and cleanup your tags) – I don’t think it would be appropriate for this data to end up in RSS subscription stats
• BlogCatalog Social Search – also recently introduced and whilst it doesn’t have RSS yet (nudge Daniel) I can see this happening in the future – again this is a search much like you would have on Technorati or Google Blogsearch

RSS Bankruptcy

Depending on how you use these sites, they can add or subtract to the total information overload you are subjecting yourself to. I am not sure whether my own usage patterns are typical, but I find I am using Social and lifestreaming more than RSS Readers.

I have 1000s of unread items in my RSS readers, though on a lifestreaming service I am not reading every item either.

If the conversation is moving away from blogs there needs to be a way to measure it, track it and possibly respond to it.

I still am not sure how to react to the new item sharing feature introduced today on Blogcatalog, where someone can share items to people following them on the Dashboard, and to their Shared widget, and leave a comment.
When I first heard that this was going to be coming just a few days ago, I immediately thought that I would be vocally against it, but it is like a Stumbleupon review or a Delicious bookmark – it is not trying to start a new conversation, just tell someone why you are sharing the link.

The problem is that people will only share content using a certain number of different methods. Isn’t it best to use the one that is most likely to be seen across multiple networks?

Disclaimer: I consult a little with Blogcatalog

Update

After a little exploring it appears Friendfeed posted about this earlier on their blog and there is further coverage on Louis Gray

It is a significant step, though not as many seem to think unusual.

Afterall, Google started as a search engine, then monetized search, and finally introduced their own publisher program Adsense.

Lots of discussion related to the often reappearing Microsoft Yahoo deal mention that display advertising is highly lucrative, and Technorati are in a prime position to serve advertising to a very specific demographic of publishers – bloggers.

Technorati know exacty what bloggers are talking about on a day to day basis, so in aggregate they can offer publishers targeted display advertising, at least in theory.

Also it is important to understand that instead of selling the vast amount of data they have, they are using it to provide an added value service.

From the official announcement:-

Our first step was a private beta. We assembled a core of like-minded sites, founded to provide community and services to bloggers and to surface the best of blog content to consumers, and were successful in attracting advertisers to the network including: T-Mobile, Toyota, and Verizon.

These sites form the base of the Technorati network’s vertical content channels and reach an audience of 17 million (with that audience increasing very shortly with several other sites about to sign). Over the next several months, we’ll be adding blogs from the mid and long tail within those verticals. Here’s some of who’s in so far:

• blogtalkradio
• Blogcritics
• blogcatalog
• BlogTV
• GeekAlerts
• GPSMagazine
• NerdApproved
• Technabob

The site itself is a little short on real information, so I thought I would try to pry some out of Tony Berkman from Blogcatalog. I was aware of some of the details at the beginning of March, but it has taken far longer than I expected for the news to finally emerge.

Andy: Hi Tony, thanks for taking the time to respond to my request to chat about the new Technorati Advertsing platform. Whilst I knew you had a deal with Technorati some time ago, it was felt best not to discuss it in detail.

Tony: My pleasure Andy

Andy: When did Technorati first approach you about their new advertising platform?

Tony: Around the beginning of January was when we started discussions. They started running ads on BC in February.

Andy: Up until that time Blogcatalog was primarily monetized using Google Adsense. Did you find Adsense was providing enough income to meet your growing development and hosting needs?

Tony: Exactly. AdSense was our primary income source. We do have a number of other sources such as premium membership and directory category sponsorships. For the first year of operation AdSense and these other sources of income enabled us to pay for hosting and developer costs. Around November 2007, BlogCatalog’s traffic exploded and bandwidth costs started to eat into the portion of income that we were using to fund development. At that point I started looking for ways to monetize the site that wouldn’t ruin the user experience.

Andy: So you decided to test Technorati Advertising?

Tony: Exactly. We entered into a relatively short term agreement so that we can see if it is beneficial and whether they can deliver on their promises. The contract term expires in November. It is really too soon to say whether we will continue after that time, but we will give them the chance to prove they can deliver.

Andy: When did you start displaying Technorati Advertising on Blogcatalog, and does it appear in all sections of the site?

Tony: We always want to avoid obtrusive advertising for our members, thus we currently display light advertising in the following sections

1. Directory Categories
2. Search Pages
3. Blog Detail Pages

And if you are a premium member, which costs $6 a month, all ads are removed from the site.

Andy: Can you elaborate a little on their performance?

Tony: The first few months were nothing to write home about as the Technorati team was getting their infrastructure together. During this time we were only displaying one vertical ad on each directory page. Recently though we have seen a move to higher paying ads that are more targeted to our audience – a win / win situation for both advertisier and publisher.

Andy: Whilst Blogcatalog gains very little mainstream coverage, it is quite a high traffic mainstream internet site with over 4M monthly pageviews. I assume that means Technorati are giving you a fairly decent deal?

Tony: We have a favorable split. Mainstream coverage is rather limited, however we certainly get a fair share of internet traffic. Traffic – BC is now closer to 9M pageviews though not all of those views are available to Technorati. For now, provided they continue to improve their offerings, Technorati is a great deal for us, and makes sense as we are able to monetize the directory withouth having to build up a sales infrastructure.

Andy: No yardsticks? Ah well… the other important aspect for any publisher is communication. Do they respond to emails?

Tony: Personally they are outstanding to work with. Their support has been first class. Though at the end of the day it comes down to whether it makes sense to have them representing our ad units, or whether it makes more sense for us to hire an ad team. There is always a balancing act and a desire to concentrate on core competence.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, it is good to have some direct feedback from someone who has already been using Technorati’s new advertising platform for some time.

My Take

At this time I don’t intend running display ads (on this blog anyway) unless it is in the form of some specific sponsorship, though it might be more interesting for some niche sites.

Display advertising is much more suited to more mainstream sites with broader topics.

On the advertising purchase page for Technorati I also noticed the following:-

You can also enquire about Technorati Conversational Marketing, the next step in entering the global conversation on the web.

That could be PR service targeting bloggers, or maybe something akin to Social Spark.

Disclaimer – I do a little consulting with Blogcatalog

There are lots of posts about how wonderful it is, or pointless but very few delving into some of the flaws or missing features. I know they have support and feedback on Google Groups… but I hate Google Groups, and the feedback from the groups isn’t necessarily making it out into the blogosphere.

I am going to keep this a little shorter than normal, I am working with Blogcatalog who have a couple of competing features (their dashboard and activity widget) thus it wouldn’t be fair to delve into this too much.

• It seems to take forever for FriendFeed to update StumbleUpon (8+ hrs) – that is forever in Social Bookmarking and news
• Stumbleupon reviews are not included with the listings, though for some reason Delicious bookmark descriptions are imported as comments
• Whilst the friend suggestion interface is great, reciprocating 40+ friendships of people who have just joined is just an impossible task – I need to see who hasn’t been friended yet, and some nice Ajax to reduce page loads to a minimum (Mixx has this similar terrible problem)
• How many people are actually following me? There doesn’t even seem to be an obvious total count.
• Not storing username and password just isn’t enough – I honestly hate any application that thinks it is ok to share Google account details – do you really want to give them access to your private email, Adsense and Adwords account? For ex-Googlers to think this is OK is extremely perplexing, or even worrying

However my biggest gripe with it, which some people seem to love is the way it takes away part of the conversation from the original source. Duncan highlighted this FriendFeed flaw very well today (warning strong language)

if I want to participate in a conversation about a blog post or similar content, I’ll leave a comment on that blog, not a third party app, because if someone writes something worthy of conversation, they should have first call on the conversation, unless of course the topic is one that requires a blog post in itself.

And going on to express this even stronger

Correct, I didn’t “like” anything because when I want to comment on an item, I’ll do it at the source, like the vast majority of people would. If it’s a Tweet I’ll reply on Twitter. If it’s a blog post, I’ll leave a comment. Why the f#$% would I want to use a third party service? Why the f#$% would I want to comment on a Tweet on FriendFeed? Or is it that I should just because he says so? Pass the bong…

I agree with Duncan

I am not sure how someone will achieve this, but what is needed if commenting is included in Lifestream services is a way to respond in the medium of choice or origin, and that includes responding to blog comments, but Lifestream applications are never going to be able to keep up with the speed of conversation on blogs, or Twitter.

You effectively create a comment echo chamber, and fragmented conversations often with people not even reading the original content.

For a content producer that causes major problems.

Fav.or.it may be the answer, in private beta -I generally don’t sign up for private betas in areas Blogcatalog could be potentially working on, even if I am not aware of it which is quite frequently.

Don’t Expect Me To Respond To Comments On FriendFeed

It might seem anti-social or against the ethos of social media, but as Brian Solis explained, my account on FriendFeed isn’t actually intended for me.

It’s not about you per se. It’s about those who enjoy following your activity online. And yes, there are many tools that do this, but at the end of the day, why not make it easier for people to connect with you using the tools that they’re most comfortable with.

New Social Neworks?

I haven’t looked at Social Thing yet, Read Write Web compares them both – honestly the only service that will get all my passwords is a desktop application, and even then it will be encrypted on my HD.

FriendFeed use a secure page (probably need account to view page) for providing your account data – they know it is sensitive – why would you share it with them?

Lumpy Porridge

When I was a kid I hated lumps in my porridge, I suppose that has never changed.

Whilst writing this post, FriendFeed finally caught up with my Stumbleupon submissions, but they are provided as “clumps” of posts and updates unless there has been specific FriendFeed activity on the item, such as a comment or someone “likes” and item.

I am aware that they are having difficulty with access restrictions to 1000s of feeds on the various services, and this will represent a scalability problem, especially with the new influx of users.

This occurs in every interface – online, Facebook, email daily broadcast, iGoogle – they are choosing what I should see at a glance

MyBlogLog API & Blogcatalog API & Social Graph API

When I visit any of these aggregation services, they don’t know who I am, and who my friends are. The best they can currently manage is to use Facebook, and in fact Facebook is currently the best way to add friends to FriendFeed.

MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog know who you are – using a combination of what you have defined within your profiles, and possibly using Google’s Social Graph API a lot more is possible, allowing you to collate friends from multiple services.

Note:Plaxo is meant to do something using the Social Graph API, so when creating an account I added my MyBlogLog Profile which provides tons of data, and to be honest with recursive use of the API it should be able to find a number of profiles, blogs etc.

Privacy advocates might think I am odd, but when I arrive at a new service, I just want it to have all my public data available, that can be reasonably obtained. I don’t want to have to provide private data such as passwords.

No one has quite got things right yet, more on Techmeme

Many bloggers look on their activity on social networks, social news and microblogging sites as an extension of their blog. For instance I look on my Stumbleupon blog as an ideal way to publish asides, or as a legitimate way to share cool content without having to worry about copyright issues that might be associated with sharing RSS items using Google Reader.
I am not a big fan of posts that are just a big links roundup.

Whilst it is easily possible to create a mashup of multiple RSS resources and feeds, and then combine them in some kind of universal widget, often the results are disappointing.

Blogcatalog Make It Easy With “My News Feed”

Feeds have now also been added to Blogcatalog profile pages

You will also notice in the top right corner of the widget that you can easily subscribe to the social lifestream of your favorite bloggers as a single feed.

Privacy

You have full control over what is shared from within Blogcatalog Dashboard setting

Bugs?

There are a few

I had to do a little CSS hacking to get the widget to display correctly with my theme, but I am sure Daniel from Blogcatalog will get those sorted out quickly.

The RSS feed needs a little work. There are duplicate lines, and it would be good to include snippets where available. I am also not sure I am a big fan of the tracking links on the blog posts that appear in the RSS feeds, but that probably helps on Blogcatalog ratings.

Disclaimer: I do some consulting with Blogcatalog

I do benefit potentially from long term promotion of Blogcatalog and by giving their competitors equal coverage I also gain a benefit, because if for instance MyBlogLog becomes a massive success, the value of competitors as a viable business also increases.

Thus it is actually with a very heavy heart that I am going to write what might be my first ever critical review of MyBlogLog.

It is my hope the MBL guys take this as constructive criticism, which I haven’t honestly seen on any other blog over the last couple of days since the features were announced, other than what seemed to be a universal yawn.

What Is Wrong With The Activity Time Line?

MyBlogLog have so far added 42 services, and I am only looking at a few of them.

However based on a comment over at Brian Solis the LifeStream currently supports

- Bebo
- Deli.cio.us
- Digg
- Flickr
- Jumpcut
- Last.FM
- MyBlogLog
- Netflix
- Stumbleupon
- Twitter
- Yahoo Answers
- Yelp
- YouTube
- Upcoming

Here are some quick annotated notes in a quick screenshot

Now I wouldn’t be so harsh if I hadn’t already read this comment by Eric on the Techcrunch writeup

Sadly, this feature has been ready to launch since June of 07, when it would have been a pioneer instead of a follower. Regardless, I’m psyched that the rest of the team had the temerity to stick it out at Yahoo in the belief that they would get to start launching killer features.

If this has been ready for 8 months and just needed pushing out of the door, you would expect a few refinements.

I have seen a few comments on the Techcrunch article suggesting that there is a lack of control of what you see in the timeline, either for privacy or information overload.
It is true that Blogcatalog have this side of the feature set more refined, but at the same time I am not a great fan of micro-management, and it is not needed with the current maximum of 40 people you follow… possibly because not enough people have added their services yet.

Tags

The way MyBlogLog has tagging implemented has always bugged me – all tags on the site still lead only to people and communities that have been tagged manually in the MyBlogLog system, rather than using the tags supplied within content with rel=”tag” or categories.

Here is an example

Those tags from Matt’s delicious feed lead to MyBlogLog’s internal tagging system, not where you would expect… either Matt’s or the global tags on Delicious. Very annoying.
It is equally annoying when you click similar tags below RSS items and again you are not presented with content.

No Mentions of Blogcatalog

Here are some reports on the MyBlogLog new features, but they ignore Blogcatalog

ReadWriteWeb
Techcrunch
Mashable
Louis Grey
Cnet
Brian Solis (Brian I am disappointed)
Webomatica
Download Squad

Best of all, Read Write Web did a round up of 35 Life Streaming sites, and for some reason Blogcatalog didn’t make that list either.

I know everyone is talking about FriendFeed which has some useful viral ideas to encourage everyone to sign up, and their Facebook integration really kicks butt.
I have a problem with FriendFeed – it is trying to grab the conversation from the various services with an internal comment system. I am not sure that is healthy.

MyBlogLog have added some kind of blog comment monitoring system, that is a good idea and something I have nudged the Blogcatalog guys about a few weeks ago, but moving the comments to FriendFeed? I am not happy with that.

If you want to compare, here is the current list of “LifeStream Supported” services on Blogcatalog

Amazon Wishlist, Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Myspace Blog, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, Twitter, YouTube

I believe there are 15 others on the way soon.

There are some inherent problems with all of these platforms… information overload and lack of specific topical areas or niches. Once you go beyond your core friends, the noise increases.

I really want to throw a wide net for information retrieval, but I only want some of it.

Update

For those unaware of some of the features introduced by Blogcatalog over the last 6 months here are some links to relevant articles.

For the programming geeks, you might be interested in the BlogCatalog API which was introduced August 2007

If you are looking to differentiate between MyBlogLog and Blogcatalog, I wrote this article back on July 2007 and it covers many of the differences which are still true today.

More recently, Blogcatalog partnered with SezWho to enable a comprehensive comment feedback system. At that time they also surpassed MBL on Alexa, though as everyone knows Alexa stats are not the most accurate to go by, and the unique differences between the services create a different usage profile.

To compare social graph features, I would suggest my article from when Blogcatalog introduced their dashboard 2 weeks ago. Of particular interest for many are the very specific controls available to protect your privacy, or to control which information you receive from different people.

p.s. I don’t class the problems previously with the messaging system as a negative review – I think that was more a general outburst from the whole blogosphere.

There is a World Outside Your Fishtank

Within “blogging” social networks I have been pushing to have a reason to add someone as a friend for a long time. Blog broadcasts, built in feed readers and OPML will eventually provide a reason to join communities.

I know that MyBlogLog are planning to also launch something similar and I have a feeling this will likely kick off more people claiming Blogcatalog is just a copycat of Mybloglog.

I first had a sneak peak at the Dashboard a few days ago and gave Tony from Blogcatalog a lot of ideas for features, such as:-

• adding snippets to the social news items, Digg buttons (title, desciption and button = old Digg Interface… yay!)
• merging URLs from multiple submissions
• pulling in friends from all your social profiles

The thing is, Blogcatalog was already collecting feed items, and displaying those from the communities you joined, and there was also a need to somehow draw other discussions taking palce on Blogcatalog into a single portal – discussions – groups – broadcasts

The social profiles have been available for some time, it is just they weren’t being used effectively, and because there was not such a purpose in updating the profiles (unless you know a little about SEO, branding and reputation management), it actually makes testing and reviewing the new features difficult.

So what is really needed is for people who have Blogcatalog accounts to add their social profile information until such time as friend data is being pulled in from places like Twitter directly through their API.

Then again, you might not want to see all the updates from that many friends all on one page – it is something that needs careful thinking about, and I have some ideas I need to map out for the development guys.

Note: I would certainly look on this interface as alpha or beta stage – as more data gets added, it is certainly going to get crowded, and I have also noted some delays in updates, though that appears to be an internal bug, as the data does seem to be fetched to other pages.

Update

I am certainly not perfect and missed something whilst digging around, which was actually mentioned in the full announcement on the Blogcatalog boards.
This is I suppose one of the negatives of previewing something before the official announcement, and wanting to post early.

With the dashboard settings, you can choose to follow the social graph of up to 40? people – as I didn’t spot this on my own, maybe something needs to be made a little clearer for new users.

You also have full control of both what you see and what you share with others

I would of course like the option to see all of my contacts on every service, and all my friends on Blogcatalog, with an option to create multiple views depending on how much noise I have time for.

There is even enhanced privacy, allowing you to selectively remove items you don’t want shared.

When you look at the combined data, it can get a little scary – this is all public data, and it hasn’t taken much to combine it and create an overall personal online profile of all your activities, even those that might normally be slightly more hidden, such as stumbling a friends blog in a topic you might not normally be associated with.

The interface is actually a lot more complete than I first of all realised.

As usual I am trying to give balanced coverage, Mybloglog had an article all to themselves the other day.
Specific dislosure:- Since July 2007 I have had some financial involvement with Blogcatalog as a consultant, though I try hard to give fair and equal coverage to their competitors.

I have been slacking a little over the last month on the updates, so time to play catch up.

First of all some big news, Blogcatalog has now surpassed MyBlogLog in traffic levels, if you believe Alexa data. They are in exactly the same niche, and share plenty of users, so whilst I don’t trust Alexa data extensively, this is a significant achievement considering it wasn’t long ago when people had trouble differentiating the two services.

If you switch to a 7 day view, you will see that Blogcatalog overtook MyBlogLog 24th January.

The observant will also note when looking at a 3 year chart that MyBlogLog had much more explosive growth over a short 3 month period, were purchased by Yahoo, and since that time has been a little bit in decline which is a shame because I still love MyBlogLog, and if I have a choice between MyBlogLog and Google Analytics for stats checking, I am more likely to have a glance in MyBlogLog than Google Analytics.

BlogCatalog has had a much more gradual growth, working to differentiate themselves by introducing lively discussion forums and member groups, and bringing bloggers together to support good causes with Bloggers Unite.
The growth has been viral, “grass roots” growth, with from memory one mention on Mashable, one mention on Marketing Pilgrim, and very little if any coverage on large technology blogs. Blogcatalog would be a great example of what Guy Kawasaki was talking about yesterday.

Forget A-list bloggers. Lousy reviews by them cannot tank your product. Great reviews cannot make it successful. Focus on big numbers—any Technorati 1,000,000 blogger can be a channel to reach people. If enough people like your product, the A-list bloggers will have to write about you.

Some key recent enhancements (click through to see working examples on some of these widgets)

Blogcatalog Discussions & Groups

Discussion Forums and Groups

There are frequent enhancements to the features in the various discussion areas, the latest one being a new widget for the discussion groups you have joined – other features include practical enhancements to the discussion features, in many cases making them more useful than Facebook, where it is very hard to track discussion in the groups you join.

BlogRank Buttons (just released)

This was announced just a few hours ago

BlogCatalog ratings are based upon various metrics including votes using a widget on your site, voting on the site, visits from Blogcatalog to your blog, and overall Blogcatalog activity in various forms.

Communities Widget

This is a way to display your profile on other social media sites introduced in December. Quite simple, and useful if you don’t want to give juice to the sites for reputation management.

On this one I am not sure who got there first, as MyBlogLog also launched a similar widget in December

There actually seems to be some bugs in the code generated, or maybe it is just my laggy connection, but I couldn’t seem to get a version that displayed both the names of a service, and icons next to them.

BlogCatalog API

I am not that great a programmer but I have managed to play around with the Blogcatalog API and create some simple applications (still to be released) by combining data from Blogcatalog with data from other APIs. Blogcatalog has had their API available for some time.

MyBlogLog should have had their API launched months ago by my reckoning, and it finally entered beta a week ago. It seems like it might have more features than the current Blogcatalog API, but once you have opened up, opening up a little more isn’t too difficult.
With wider adoption (the tech bloggers have been wooed by MBL in the past) the new MBL API is being greeted as the possible saviour of Yahoo.
Sure, it is possible MyBlogLog have more data stored, I am not sure what data Blogcatalog collect, have a wider audience, and MyBlogLog have the “social starfish” available via API, but it isn’t much more work for Blogcatalog to allow access to that data.
MyBlogLog have however been working on infrastructure heavily for the last… 12 months – I would hope their API is now ready for some heavy usage.

I would love to have seen some cool apps made with the Blogcatalog API by now

Support For WordPress.com, Myspace, or Yahoo! 360 Blog?

This is something that MyBlogLog have had for some time, Blogcatalog announced support for WordPress.com, Myspace and Yahoo! 360 yesterday.

Who knows, maybe you can even see my recent visitors in a feed reader, in fact that would be an interesting addition.

Tagging & Reading

Quite a few months ago I wrote about Blogcatalog parsing tags from your feed items and then listing your content on varous tag pages, just like Technorati. At the time they only offered support for a few blogs, using a specific format for tags and categories. I noticed a couple of months ago that they now have my blog being picked up and fed into tag feeds

In addition on your profile pages it is now possible to read the feeds of the blogs you have added to your neighborhood

Ok now for the big one…

Blogcatalog SezWho Partnership

Blogcatalog today have just announced a partnership with SezWho, who provide special plugins to integrate with Plugin Systems on various blogging and discussion forums.
The good things from my perspective:-

• SezWho doesn’t require any form of browser plugin
• This doesn’t replace the existing comment system, thus a blog owner retains the content on their site, and if they choose, can remain dofollow. That isn’t true of other replacement comment systems with similar features.
• No browser plugin is required – I often had problems using various browser based comment tracking with incompatibilities, and I also had problems with their plugins, though I must admit I haven’t retried with cocomment recently, maybe that situation has improved. Comment tracking that required me to click a button was always awkward, and subscribing to RSS feeds for comments on individual posts just became a chore – we will see how this works in the long run
• Comment ratings – this could be likened to the thumbs up / thumbs down on SEOmoz where you gain points, but this is a distributed rating system that means you gain in reputation for leaving high quality comments across multiple blogs – I am not sure whether this gets gamed heavily, but Ihope that it will encourage better commenting, especially on dofollow blogs.

Warning:- I may be more inclined to just delete a URL from a spam comment rather than deleting them totally, so that other readers can also vote your comment down
yes, sometimes there is a little evil in me

Negative points?

• Only support for WordPress self-hosted and Moveable Type – in many ways I would look on this as a plus, as it might encourage more people onto their own hosting, though I hope they can come up with a solution for my many blogging friends on Typepad.
• Installation is a little complicated for a novice, though there is a WordPress widget (regular readers know I don’t like WordPress Widgets though for SEO reasons)

I should also point out that as I am writing this I haven’t tested the integration on this blog with the threaded comments, but I don’t expect there to a problem, and by the time many people read this I will have everything up and running.

Setting Up SezWho

Log into Blogcatalog, go to your account and manage your blog

You will see just after the feed management section a big button to create an account on SezWho. |Click it, wait a moment or 2, and you will be issued an API key, and you will be given a link to click to download special versions of the SezWho plugins.

Goodbye MyAvatars

I have been using the WordPress plugin MyAvatars for over a year now, but it is time for it to be retired.

MyAvatars uses images from MyBlogLog, and unfortunately on popular content it is starting to cause me problems on page loading times. This isn’t something that was a major problem for me before, because I had a very fast connection, but it has started to cause me real problems, maybe because MyBlogLog switched over to the Yahoo image platform, or maybe it is a problem that always existed.

This doesn’t prevent people viewing my content quickly, because avatars and widgets are generally loaded in parallel, but on a slow connection it can start to hurt a little.
When your total page sizes can reach over 1MB, and most of that is avatars on comments, it is time to reconsider.

One caveat, I am not sure if the SEZWho Blogcatalog plugin will add avatars to trackbacks, I will have to take a look.

Benefits

Big immediate benefit for Blogcatalog is press coverage, as SezWho are in California. I think it is a good match as both are heavily aimed at promoting discussion between bloggers, both on blogs and off them.

I am also not a fan of applications that try to do too much – SezWho seems to do just enough to be worthwhile whilst leaving me in control of content left on my blog, and commenter ratings will certainly help in making the decision on whether a commenter is generally well behaved. I don’t mind short jokey comments or great post Andy if it is from someone legitimate, it is when someone comes in as a first time commenter, you rarely know if they are genuine.

About Blogcatalog & SezWho

My blog has in the last 9 months grown into quite an in depth resource on all things “Blogcatalog“. I first started writing about them when they relaunched around April 2007 with an initial investment of $40000 to purchase the existing property.
Full coverage of Blogcatalog can be found by browsing my Blogcatalog tag.

Primary competitor for Blogcatalog is Mybloglog

SezWho when they received $1M investment from KPG Ventures back in October 2007 were given quite a luke warm reception on Techcrunch.

Competitors to SezWho include Disqus, Intense Debate and coComment

Specific Disclosure – I do some consulting with Blogcatalog on a very much low key, part time basis, though I also give coverage to their competitors and try to remain impartial – I have given MyBlogLog extensive coverage as well, most recently in a joint interview with Ian Kennedy on Collective Thoughts

Further coverage no doubt on the Blogcatalog blog though the press release isn’t posted yet.

Update

I had planned to have the widget code working within a couple of minutes of posting, but it seems not to fully like my theme or maybe some other incompatibility.
This is what it is meant to look like.

Update 2

There is now coverage on Techcrunch, Mashable Rex Dixon Tom Drapeau (AOL / Propeller), Blogstring and Jitendra is compiling a list of blog mentions on the SezWho blog.

I am fascinated what it will take to finally get some mention of Blogcatalog on Techmeme and possibly some wider exposure.

I had been planning to write about Bloggers Unite about a week ago, with a followup post yesterday, but most of yesterday I was again without a connection. I gave up at 7am.

On Blogcatalog there is now a list forming of all the blogs that took part, and one way for me to give a little something back is to link to all of them.

I haven’t just copied a list of URLs, I have actually visited each site and read every amazing article listed – there is a lot of kindness in the world and many of these stories are quite remarkable and touching.

Many of the posts used a generic Bloggers Unite acts of Kindness title, so where needed I have used a title that is appropriate to the story told, or captured the essence of the story or key phrase.

If you didn’t take part I encourage you to read the stories that catch your eye. Many are really quite moving.

Starlight: Acts Of Kindness
You Can Feel Good About Good
Grander than the Bell and the Red Suit
Bloggers Unite (a touching post about her Mum)
Jericho Fans Become Boo’s Angels
Singing At A Retirement Home
John Gebhardt Caring For A Little Girl in Iraq
Pay It Forward & Acts of Random Kindness
Examples and Quotes From Acts of Kindness
Recycling & The Boys Brigade Charity Gift Box Project
Helping A Pregnant Damsel In Childbirth
Collecting Litter
My Inspiration – What are you grateful for?
Living In A Box
Caro Gesù Bambino ti voglio avvisare…
Teaching My 5 Year Old The Gift Of Giving
Want to have an amazing Christmas?
Give A Smile
Acts of Kindness Should Be Part Of Our Daily Lives
Its Never Too Late To Do An Act Of Kindness
Bell Ringers & Paper Trees
A White Cat For Christmas
Xmas Charity Appeal
The Beaming Faces of The Tiny Tots
Helping A Colleague
Hugs For The Lonely
Tribute To Rescued Cats And Dogs
Crochet Some Recycled Wheelchair and Walker Totes
Promote Thrift Stores
The Greatness Of Human Kindness and Compassion
Acts of Kindness While Christmas Shopping
Donations To Carol For A Cause
Child’s Play
Scraping Snow To Make Friends
Caring For Family
Let People Know That Someone Loves Them
Random Acts of Kindness Should Last All Year Long
Kindness Like Love Is Unconditional
Follow your heart and do your best work…
Buying Gifts From The Hunger Site Store
Donors Choose
Cooking Pancakes
One Should Do The Right Thing For No Other Reason Than It’s Right
Free Rice – Provide and Learn
Magnificent Monday: My Mother
Sharing Books With Random People
Ideas For Acts of Kindness
A Simple Act of Kindness Affected Three Lives
Acts of Kindness: A Wardrobe Full of Compassion
Bloggers Unite: Small Thing Make Big Thing
Bloggers Unite: Save Some Cats
Ellie’s Act of Kindness – A Guided Meditation
It’s Not Only Human Beings That Are Capable Of Acts Of Kindness
Touching Other’s Lives
Secret Santa
The Ripple Effect Of Acts Of Kindness
9 Acts of Christmas Kindness
Mystery Reggae Man
Caring – it all begins at home
Operation Christmas Child
Bloggers unite. Streetwise.
Save The Wild Side and Alley Cats
Each Minute Passes In Own Life We Must Spend It In Helping Others
Reading Marathon
I made someone today feel warm and human.
Make The World A Better Place
Altruistic Disease
Bloggers Unite: Highlighting Acts Of Kindness In Colon Panama
Bloggers Unite: Crafts for China
Take One Activity In Your Day
There Is So Much Good In People
Buzzards Bay Area Habitat For Humanity
Kind Classes
An Act Of Kindness Should Be Spontaneous And Not Forced
Helping Filipino children read their way out of poverty
My kindness towards poverty
Animal Rescue Charities
A day at the Senior Citizen Center
Cub Scouts At The Food Bank
A Day In A Camp
12 Gifts of Christmas: Kindness
Delivering Angel Tree Gifts in the Spirit of Christmas
Discovering Love and Kindness By Donating Blood
One Good Deed Every Day
The Kindness Of Strangers
Helping With Essential Winter Tasks
Counting on Kindness
Give and Give Back
Words by Bloggers & Acts of Kindness
Hurricane Sidr: acts of kindness
Ridiculously Easy Ways To Spread Some Kindness Around
Beautiful Minds: a day’s meal -Used in the best way
Small and Simple Acts Of Kindness
Are you the girl with sweet smile?
I Fostered a Baby Elephant, Tong Jan
Bloggers Unite & Kiva
Homeless and Lost Souls
An act of kindness that’s been going on for years

A little personal act of kindness

Whilst I was over in the UK last, and in fact every trip I usually pop in to see old neighbours, many of whom being long-standing friends of my parents are now quite elderly, and help with small chores, even just taking the rubbish out or updating them on life in other parts of the world.
Whilst I was writing this I received an email to inform me that one of those neighbours passed away on Friday. I almost didn’t have time to say hello on my last visit, and am so glad I did.

What’s In It For Me?

Honestly… nothing directly, unless the community owner pays you to vote for them, either directly or with prizes.
I must admit I am not a big supporter of offering prizes and gifts to encourage participation. As an example I can encourage you to join the Collective Thoughts Community on MyBlogLog, but I am not going to offer a specific incentive.
I have found that most sites offering prizes to achieve a specific marketing goal, having achieved their objectives, abandon the communities while moving onto other targets.

Have you gained benefit from using the community? If so you should think about giving something back freely.

They Make Money From Me Already

Most social communities ARE free, but still have some level of monetization

• Advertising many people generally ignore
• User data they might in some way exploit
• Link juice they exploit for other commercial properties

The income earned by many communities wouldn’t be sufficient to pay for extensive commercial advertising, thus they have to rely on other methods.

Viral Growth By Word Of Mouth Marketing

Whilst you might think many of these communities, especially the more niche sites are raking in huge amounts of money, ultimately many of them grow only through word of mouth marketing.
The money they make is sufficient to cover server costs, and sometimes staff wages, but there is very little additional funding to cover paid advertising unless they have gained some significant additional funding.

Many communities grow through various forms of viral marketing, such as inviting friends by email, widgets on blogs etc, and many mercenary webmasters might look on that as being a sufficient (and often short-lived) contribution.

I Gave Up My Screen Real Estate, Isn’t That Enough?

I have been a strong supporter of various blogging communities for a long time, and am often criticized on their effect on page loading times, the amount of screen real estate they take up, and what benefit I really gain from supporting them.

Ultimately the biggest gain is being part of a community, the fabric of the web and the blogosphere that holds things together, a conduit or hub of the community rather than an end point.

It is hard to measure community, it is also hard to measure community spirit.

Giving Something Back

Think about giving something back to the communities you find most valuable, whether it be MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, Blogcatalog, Sphinn, Mixx, Digg, PlugIM, Facebook

You can nominate your favorites over at Collective Thoughts and of course you can duplicate your nominations, or vote for something different on all the blogs accepting nominations